World Editing 2

Introduction to 3D Game Development

Game Development using RF

Tutorial 2
Building connected rooms
In this section, we will learn how to build levels with connected rooms. You will learn
the usage of cut brush as well as key editing operations in level building.

Firstly bring up the world editor. Create a hollow brush with X-value : 1024, Z-value
512, Y-value 512. (Go to tutorial 1 for the steps)

The screen of the world editor should not be able to show the whole room. This will
be difficult for us to edit, so we do some things to ease the process.

Change to camera mode and move the cursor to the top right window. Now with the
right mouse button pressed down, drag downward so that the level now being shown
in zoom-up scale. Do the same to the other window similar to that below.

2.1 Decorating : Changing the textures

The created room is using the Aztec texture for all the faces, which is quite boring.
Let’s change to more interesting textures.

1
World Editing 2
Introduction to 3D Game Development

Editing the interior is very handy inside the world editor and it forms the key
operations to produce dramatic effects in any game. First switch to select mode and
click on the created room.
Now press the PageDown key on the keyboard and the whole brush would change to
light purple – this indicate the change to a minor mode, which enable fine editing of a
brush. Press the left & right arrow key would now switch to different faces of the
brush. You may wish to cycle through different faces and also note the corresponding
display in different windows, especially the camera window. Note that when in minor
mode, you can still navigate inside the level by switching to camera mode and drag
the LMB. Finally pressing PageDown again in select mode will bring you back to the
major mode in which we can add or edit brushes as a whole. Repeat the above
operations until you are quite confident with the mode switching here.

Now select the room and go to minor mode and select one of the wall of the room.
We would like to change the texture of this room, which can be done easily by
clicking on the texture tab on left. A number of textures are available in the default set
up. Let’s choose the ‘cuneifor’ texture and click on the apply button, The camera
window should now show similar as below.

You can now decorate the room according to your personal taste!
Note : You may need to choose the “Build/rebuild BSP tree” menu to see the effect.

2.2 Duplicating Brushes

Now switch the editor to camera mode, move the cursor into top view and now drag
with left mouse button down and move in downward direction. This would effectively
scroll the level up in the top view. Scroll until the room is at the bottom of the
window.

2
World Editing 2
Introduction to 3D Game Development

Now switch to select mode and click on the created room. With the mouse cursor over
the room, press the shift key and LMB and move in upward direction. A blue outline
indicating the room outline should be displayed to show that another copy of the same
room is being created! Drag up to a little distance then release the LMB. Now we
have successfully created two rooms. The situation should like below.

Now we do something to connect the two rooms. Firstly we have to create the
corridor, that means we need another hollow brush. Creating a brush to connecting the
two rooms can be done via pressing the template button. But here we demonstrate
another way.

Firstly use the copy operation to create an additional room. You should have similar
situation as below.

3
World Editing 2
Introduction to 3D Game Development

Switch to select mode. Note there are some buttons near the mode buttons as
indicated below.

These are the editing buttons that can move, scale, shear, rotate the selected brush
respectively. Click on the scale button ( as indicated by the red arrow).

Move the cursor over the selected newly created brush. The cursor should change to
scale cursor at the outlines of the brush. Now shape the brush into a corridor shape
similar to that below.

4
World Editing 2
Introduction to 3D Game Development

Note
1. During scaling operation, if you can’t scale in the horizontal direction, try to
check the axis menu and see whether the ‘lock x’ option is on. If it’s the case,
click on it to disable it to do the horizontal scaling.
2. You should try to scale the corridor so that the brushes are at least touching
each other i.e. no space in between the two brushes. In some cases a brush can
be placed intersecting each other, but it may easily lead to leakage issue – the
level has cracks that you can peep through to the empty space exterior to the
level. Your level will then not be able to walkthrough then. This would arouse
many times in your level editing when you are working with more
complicated level, be prepared. The magnifying functions i.e. zoom in-out by
dragging RMB in camera mode is very useful to combat this.

2.3 Building the connections : Use of cut brush

Now the two rooms and built with the corridor connecting them. However, we still
can’t navigate from room to room as the three brushes are separating on their own.
Let’s do the work to break the separation.

Change to template mode and click on the box button. The box brush panel should
appear as shown. Customize the options to the setting as below.

5
World Editing 2
Introduction to 3D Game Development

Note that we choose the option of cut brush and that the brush is a solid one. Press the
“customize template” and press “Add to world” create the cut brush. As we
mentioned above, the cut brush will carve out volume from a solid brush, we would
now use it to remove the separation between the room and corridor.

Switch to select mode and click on the cut brush. Then using the scale/move operation,
shape up the cut brush as in the following
screen.

6
World Editing 2
Introduction to 3D Game Development

Note the cut brush won’t cannot cut into the exterior of the level as shown i.e. the cut
brush must reside inside the volume of your level. Otherwise leakage would result
which prevent you from completing something called BSP calculation and thus the
walkthrough of the level.
The application of cut brush can be visualized by looking into the camera view as
shown above. Now do the same to the other end of the corridor and do the
compilation to see the result.

7
World Editing 2
Introduction to 3D Game Development

Exercise

1. Create a sculpture with similar shape as that in the image below.

8
World Editing 2
Introduction to 3D Game Development

2.4 Performance monitoring and Debugging Support

As in most software project development, computer game building requires many
tools throughout the process to monitoring the quality of developed product. These
demands are more stringent in 3D game development as the computing horse power is
limited on a typical computer system, whereas the user requirements are rocket high
in recent years.

In game level design, the developers need some tools to monitoring the software
performance in different point in the created level so as to know whether the level is
optimally designed or not. The performance of the system in a computer game is
normally measured by frame rate (fps – frame per second; i.e. how fast the system can
draw a picture of the world) In RF, we can read the current fps by checking the
options in the program menu.

Create or open a level and run the walkthrough. When walking inside your level,
press “esc” key, this will bring up a menu. Click on the options and this will bring up
the options menu. Then click on the debug will bring you to the debug menu. Here
you will find various options to help you in check the performance as well as
debugging your created level. Check the frame rate box and press “esc” to back to the
walkthrough again, you will find the frame rate being shown on the top left of the
screen. With this, you can check whether the design of your level is efficient enough
or not.

There are other options to help in debugging visually. You are welcomed to
experiment with these options.